1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates real-time multimedia streaming, and more particularly to transcoding real-time multimedia streams.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile electronic devices have rapidly evolved from single-purpose tools for communication or music playback into robust computing systems that have a wide range of multimedia capabilities. In addition to viewing multimedia content pre-loaded on the device's memory, the availability of high-speed network connections on these portable devices has made it possible for users to receive multimedia broadcast streams. To maintain their market share and their popularity among users, multimedia streaming providers provide a way for their user audience to display streaming multimedia content on a wide range of client devices, such as smartphones, portable media players, game consoles, tablet computers, and traditional desktop computers.
One major challenge of providing streaming multimedia content to such a diverse range of client devices is the significant differences in computing and graphics performance, screen resolution, compatible transportation protocols, and supported multimedia formats between devices. For example, a high bit rate and high resolution live video stream may provide a desirable user experience on a desktop computer, but the same stream would experience significant difficulties with the limited connection speed, computing capabilities, and multimedia format support on most smartphones. To enhance compatibility with different types of client devices, a multimedia streaming provider must be able to deliver multimedia streams in multiple formats and bitrates over multiple transportation protocols.
The process used to convert multimedia streams into multiple formats and bitrates uses a significant amount of computing power that is not available to most broadcasters, so the conversion process needs to be performed server-side by the multimedia streaming provider. However, existing methods of server-side stream conversion do not have a method of selecting multimedia formats based on user demand, which leads to a waste of computer resources as the server generates converted streams that are not sent to any users. The significant resources used for server-side stream conversion have prevented it from being implemented on a large scale, making it difficult for users on a diverse range of devices to watch a multimedia stream from any broadcaster that must rely on the multimedia streaming provider to perform the stream conversion.